Chapter Text
She starts ripping up the warped linoleum in the kitchen during a Judge Judy commercial break. It’s been peeling at the seam where the lip of the threshold meets the living room since they moved in, the humidity breaking the seal and puffing it. She has toed it and watched it curl back. She pauses on her way back from the bathroom, rubs her damp hands on her tank top, and pulls.
It breaks free two feet in and the kitchen chairs squeal against the floor. After that, she cranks the volume on the TV, finds a screwdriver under her father’s bed, and sets to work.
It has been four months since she has had to put her body to use. Stone Free shimmers over her as blue translucent armor, fluttering like crumpled wings free from the chrysalis of her skin. It feels like being naked. She shoves her stand back into her body and uses her own arms, her own strength, and sweat gathers on the creases of her body from the effort.
She stops only to pick Emporio up from school, and he doesn’t ask. He sits in the living room to do his homework and watch the Discovery channel until her father comes home with takeout. It’s hours later at 10 PM, with Emporio in bed and half of the kitchen floor torn to shreds, that her father says more than hello.
He leans against the doorframe and holds a can of Coke sweating in his hand. She doesn’t really notice or care about his eyes on her back.
“Want a soda?” he asks, saying soda like そうだ and it throws her for a moment.
“Sure,” she grunts. She rips at the linoleum with her hand and a dissatisfyingly small piece pulls away. She tosses it on the pile behind her.
He taps the can against her shoulder, leaving drops of water, and she takes it. It was the one he was drinking from, so they must be running out.
Dad goes back to leaning against the doorframe, and when she finishes drinking most of the can, she belches and hunches over to survey the stretch of stippled white plastic still glued in place. The ground beneath her isn’t cement, but reminds her of it; gritty and grey but dirtier, sticking to her shaved thighs with lotion and sweat. Her body is sore in a way that makes her mad, because she hasn’t done shit all day, and that’s the point of this. She’s barely made any progress at all.
“Your great-grandfather wants to give you a gift,” he says.
“Yeah? What for?”
He doesn’t say anything so she looks back, and he’s pinched his mouth to the side. He watches the moths whap against the screen over the window, above the sink, attracted to the light inside.
“Dad, what’s the gift for?” she asks again.
He blinks and rubs his hand over his mouth. The sound of his day-old stubble against his palm is loud.
“I didn’t tell him much, but he knows what you did,” he says.
“Huh,” is all she says before picking up the screwdriver again.
She’s trying to wedge the chisel tip between the seal of linoleum and floor, forcing her weight behind it, until it jerks free and she stumbles.
“Fuck!”
“He’s giving you money to go to Japan.”
She turns again and this time, he’s looking at her. His gaze bounces between her, her hands, and the floor.
“I...who else is going?” she asks.
“Just you. Should I tell him no?”
“No, uh,” she shakes her head, lose hair clinging to her sticky face. “Uh. Yeah. Ok. To visit Baba, right?”
“And Josuke.”
She frowns, and shifts her stiffs legs on the floor with difficulty.
“How long am I going to be gone? I don’t want to -”
“- It’s fine.”
The frown turns into a glare. “You’re being weird. What’s going on?”
“Two weeks. One with Baba, one with Josuke,” he says. The line of his mouth shifts, and his head tips to the side as if he is judging the weight of his next words.
“Josuke asked.”
“Huh. Really?” A nod. She lifts her shoulders in a weak shrug, looking at the jagged line where the linoleum meets the bare floor, half finished and exhausting. She doesn’t remember how long she zones out for but Dad never presses for her to continue; he’s patient.
“Yeah. Alright. Sounds fun,” she says, and slowly unfolds herself to stand.
It feels like shit. Her joints set off like fireworks, popping as she twists her body to stretch away the stiffness that settled in. She hates what is left around her: a half finished mess created with good intentions.
She moves to the massive pile to scoop up the torn sheets by hand, but Dad’s fingers touch her elbow.
“I’ll do it. There’s food on the coffee table.”
Part of her wants to fight him and say it’s her mess to clean up, but she must look out of her mind if he’s offering. She sighs, dramatically, and clasps her hand around Dad’s arm. He smiles a little just before she lets go and shuffles out of the kitchen.
The house is open. Fat beetles pepper themselves throughout the rooms and Baba calls them her friends, along with the country cats yowling for the birds chirping in the yard. The dog that Jolyne finds on her bedroll one morning is, she assumes, another friend. A Kai Ken who yawns, teeth snapping shut and gazing at her with foxlike eyes.
“Who’s fuckin’ dog are you?” Jolyne asks.
The dog blinks.
“Right. You’re Japanese,” she says, and it’s too early to relearn a language. She bumps her wrist against her forehead, eyes screwed shut. “Dame? Ike?”
Nothing. She pulls herself and the dog from the bed, groaning at the aches blooming in her body, and the sweaty t-shirt clinging to her back cooling slightly in the free air. Her loose hair falls around face her in stringy clumps, curling in the humidity.
“Baba!” she shouts, dragging the dog with her. “Baba, what’s the word for go away?”
Her grandmother’s voice is faint when it calls back to her, and she can’t make out the words. Based on the light pouring in through the open walls, it’s late morning on a sunny day. The cicadas aren’t screaming yet, but small bugs fly around in the sun, turning into daytime drifting stars from the light catching their wings through the gardens. Her feet stick to the cool wood floors, and the heat is already dense and a struggle to walk through; the dog hates it, too.
She is surprised she remembers the house. It folds open and shut like a wooden puzzle, every inch of it explored in her early childhood, small legs running the length of the floors and shoving aside doors with loud clacks. It was a toy, a novelty, large and sprawling with luminous paper walls she would watch shadows move behind. Mom would be back home in Florida finishing classes for her Masters during those summers. Jolyne would lean her face on her hands and watch Baba cook dinner, handing her slippery slivers of raw fish. Dad would arrive smelling of salt from his long commute from the coast, emptying sandy pockets of shark teeth and baleen.
She forgot about that.
Baba is in the yard, just outside the gate of the high garden fence in the wide fields. She waves brightly in her dirty overalls and the hose in her hand is fanning out a high shower of water, rainbowing in the mist. Jolyne steps into the sun and it’s begging already to brown her skin.
“Good morning! Who’s this?” Baba says.
Jolyne stops on the stone path to keep away from Baba’s hose, and the dog sits. She groans.
“You don’t know? He was in my bed this morning.”
“Well, don’t tell your father you had a boy over,” she winks, and points the hose behind the fence, watering something.
“Baba, what do we do with him?”
“Just let him be. He’ll find his way.”
Jolyne isn’t convinced. She lets go of the collar, and the dog settles down against her legs, heat escaping from his black fur and into her skin. Shaving him would be a kindness, but he doesn’t pant. He loves the warming stone path baking in the sun.
She scoffs and walks forward to see what Baba is doing, to find her grandmother watering the wildflowers growing against the fence. The ground is wet and specks of mud and grass cling to her feet as she walks further into the field.
She remembers pushing the boundaries of the yard beyond the fence. She’d run through the grass when it grew tall and watch pale butterflies flutter with a net in her hands, and toe the line of the property to the dark, thick woods. The dense black of the trees melted into darkness, growing like a wave threatening to crash, her head knocked back in wonder of whether it would finally fall. Her father would say a sharp don’t, and she’d turn around to see him standing at the fence gate when he wasn’t there before.
“Sleep well, honey?” Baba asks.
Jolyne nods. The woods are still there. She was worried they wouldn’t be, after the drive from the airport revealed all the new developments in the land. Maybe the Kujos owned it.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“Yeah,” Jolyne says softly. The sound of water hitting the fence stops and she snaps out of her thoughtless state. “I mean, yeah, sure.”
“Good! I bought American cereal, just for you!”
Baba steps around the dog as they go into the house. Jolyne nudges him with her foot but he stays still, so she keeps walking to follow her grandmother into the kitchen.
The cabinets open to reveal an entire row of sugary American cereals, and Jolyne leans back as Baba lists off what’s available while stirring something in a pot over the stove. Jolyne just reaches over her and grabs the box of Froot Loops, making Baba laugh.
The table is already set, with more small bowls and dishes than the two of them need. Jolyne’s already on her second bowl when Baba brings over the pot she had been tending, and pours a stream of amber soup: miso, homemade, not the instant stuff from the stiff white packets Dad buys from the store. The lids of the other bowls are lifted to reveal a full Japanese breakfast.
“You’re going to eat all that?”
Baba laughs. “I made a little extra. Help yourself.”
She sits down and Jolyne hastily slurps the last of her cereal to try the rectangles of fried tofu drizzled in a black, syrupy sauce. Baba starts with a bit of fish, and Jolyne watches as her grandmother’s old hands pick around needle white bones with ease.
“Y’know, Dad tries to make this sometimes,” she says as she chews. “But it all tastes really bad.”
“I can mail him some better ingredients,” Baba says, fretting. “Oh, I knew he’d get homesick. I should see if any Japanese places in Florida serve breakfast -”
“- Baba, he’s an old dude,” Jolyne says. The tofu is good and she holds back on eating all of it. “We don’t even get Japanese that often, it’s too expensive.”
Her grandmother’s face falls, as does the piece of fish she had between her chopsticks. Jolyne starts shaking her head and putting up her hands.
“No, no, it’s fine, we -”
“- Oh honey, I can teach you! Don’t you want to know about your culture?”
Jolyne frowns. “I don’t - I dunno. It’d be cool to, like, speak Japanese? Like I used to, but. I dunno.”
It all seems pointless. This is her first time back in the country since she was twelve, and that had been an obvious attempt to keep the family together. By then she had the vocabulary of a five year old. A surly five year old, who spent half the trip shouting all the curses she picked up from her father at her father. At least when he was around to hear them, because she can only remember seeing him at the beach.
Baba at least doesn’t try to do something - something weird, Jolyne doesn’t know what, some obscure Japanese shit she isn’t sure Japanese people even do - but picks up her food again with a thoughtful look.
“Well...we can teach you Japanese some other time. There’s a man in Morioh that can help you with that. He gave your father Italian.”
Jolyne pauses picking up a lump of rice with her fingers.
“Lessons?” She offers the word to end the sentence.
“Hm?”
“There’s a guy in Morioh who gave Dad Italian lessons?”
“Oh. Right. You haven’t met him.”
Baba’s gaze drifts away and Jolyne shoves rice into her mouth. She tries to eat one of the fried eggs with chopsticks when Baba gasps, finds whatever she had been trying to spot with that distance look, and Jolyne flings yolk over the table.
“I’ll show you the Kujo family history!”
The room Baba brings her to is in the back wing of the house, closed to the bugs and summer air until they barge in. Together they remove the walls and shoji, the light dust blanketing the room kicking to life and swirling in the sun like a drunken swarm, disrupted by the real insects that sweep in. Each wooden clack transforms the room, each movement bringing them closer to a new place.
In the fresh light, her eyes land on the samurai armor against the wall. The room isn’t cluttered with ancient junk like the basement back at her mother’s house, and is open instead, the back wall a simple shrine that looks to be out of use. There are a pair of dressers against another wall with framed photographs and knick knacks piled on the tops. Pushed next to the closet door is a line of grey filing cabinets.
Baba claps her hands to brush them off and beams.
“I know you never get to see your grandfather, and I doubt Jotaro talks about him much,” she says, and looks around the room with bright eyes, love filling her lungs instead of air. “But, this house belongs to the Kujos. They’ve been here since the Edo Period.”
“Are we samurais?” Jolyne asks, finding it hard to pull her eyes away from the armor.
Baba laughs. “Once! But from what I’ve found, the family backed the modernity of the Meiji period very quickly. It’s amazing this has survived, and I’ve had it restored since.”
Jolyne goes to it, looking at the funny black mask with the bristling mustache, tentative in touching the golden ribbing lining the chest. Her sweaty fingers leave a ghost trail on the metal as she drags them across.
“Some of what’s here is stuff I’ve found myself, doing research. Sadao doesn’t have much interest and has me as the head of the estate now. Under my Japanese name, of course, in case some distant relatives surface and find out I’m the one in charge. But,” she laughs, and walks to the dressers. “I think that only happens to the Joestars.”
“No kidding.”
Before she can ask to try it on, Baba is gasping and laughing. Jolyne turns around to find her holding one of the frames with her hand over her mouth.
“Jolyne, honey, come look.”
She goes to see what the laughter is about and grins when her eyes land on it. She’s seen plenty of baby pictures of her father to know what he looked like as a child, and the picture is of him. He is standing proud with the samurai helmet on, fists on his hips. His father is kneeling behind him with the mask on. Baba keeps tittering with squeaky laughs and flutters her hand in front of her face.
“I forgot we had this.”
“How? It’s probably the best picture in the collection,” Jolyne says. Baba laughs some more, and Jolyne looks at the man behind her father. Her grandfather is a small man, shorter than Baba, and in his youth he was lean. With the mask on, he could be a stranger.
“Hey, Baba? Dad and Sofu, they get along, right?”
Her grandmother’s grin fades into a smile, eyes still locked on the picture. She sets it back down on the dresser, then clasps her hands over her heart; the sigh she releases is heavy.
“Oh, yes. They get along fine. Just...,” she trails off and her eyebrows tip up, touched with sadness. “Sadao is never home much. It costs a lot to maintain the house, so I knew from the start he would be away. Your father was very young when he asked me if I was happy, being married to a man that left so often.”
She laughs lightly, and leans forward to search for more photos to pick up.
“I said I wouldn’t change a thing. Jotaro has told me he’s more like a friend than a father, which I suppose is true. It’s a little unconventional, but that doesn’t make it bad.”
Jolyne nods, trying to understand. Sofu calls sometimes and with her limited Japanese, she can eavesdrop enough to know her father and grandfather’s conversations revolve around music and Baba. The tone of her father’s voice is warm and when he hangs up, nothing has changed, unlike the phonecalls from Baba. She insists now on speakerphone and Dad’s voice is full of exhausted sighs as they talk. He always hangs up with I love you, talk to you soon, bye, but Jolyne can tell he means it. He is still her son no matter how old they get.
“Oh, here we go,” Baba says and lifts a new photo. “I forgot I had framed a copy.”
Five men stand on the cracked ground of a landing strip, asphalt dusted over with the sands from the desert surrounding them. They all look out of place in the landscape save for the one man dressed in long, light fabrics, neck adorned in gold. They all look out of place together, their differences jumping forward more than their similarities. She has seen the photograph before.
“Dad has this on his desk,” she says. “It’s been in the house, like, forever.”
“Oh, good. I’m glad he keeps it. I keep a loose one in the family shrine, but I might replace it now,” Baba says, and taps her finger against her lip in thought.
“Dad never - I mean, I figured it out. I know Uncle Polnareff and Gramps and Dad, but, um.”
She freezes and starts twisting her fingers. She has heard the names once, when her father struggled to explain how a family legacy landed in his hands at age seventeen, and she’ll probably fuck them up, saying them now. Her blood feels thicker and harder to pump. It seems rude.
“Are the other two, uh, Avdol? And Kakyoin, right?”
Baba’s face lifts with mild surprise, then she’s smiling. “Yes. He told you?”
Jolyne shrugs and looks at the picture. Her father and Kakyoin are thin, gawky, the pair of them mostly arms and legs. Her father is almost smiling, but even under the shade of his hat, his eyes hold an anger that is warding off exhaustion. She’s seen the same look in her mugshot.
“He didn’t say much,” she admits.
Baba nods in understanding. She rubs the dust away from the top of the frame with her finger.
“When they came home, my father told me most of what happened. Jotaro would mention it, sometimes...I think I was the only one he talked to about it.”
“Can you tell me?” Jolyne asks, so sudden she surprises herself.
Baba looks uncertain. Then, like her father, she leans her head to the side and makes up her mind. She nods.
They go into another room together, Baba carrying the framed photograph. It is sparse and even with the humming cicadas it feels somber and still, a room not meant for living but for passing through. It is already open and reveals a view of the central garden. The sun is high above now and the dog is wandering to each tree and shrub, panting mouth drooling and sniffing. With a light jingle of his collar, he jumps into the room and flops down at the ledge of the floor.
Baba brings her to the wall with the simple, clean shrine. The popping of their knees when they kneel times with a pause in the cicada’s song, and a need to apologize for the intrusion raises the hair on the back of Jolyne’s neck.
“I keep this up,” Baba explains. She pulls the loose photograph from Egypt from where it was leaning against a flower vase, and places the frame down in its place. “It was for the Kujos, but, Sadao said I could add to it after Uncle Smokey died. That’s him, right there, with my father.”
The picture has the same feeling of the one from Egypt, two different people thrown together, juxtaposed and strange. Gramps throws his arm around a smaller man, clean in a navy suit that is rumpled by her great-grandfather, smiling with a quiet presence. Gramps is all messy, greying hair and dimples, his own outfit a collared shirt and undone tie limp around his neck.
“I didn’t know he had a brother,” Jolyne says.
“He was never in good enough health to travel, so your father never really knew him. But he was a very smart man. A politician.”
“Explains the suit,” Jolyne says. Baba laughs.
“And here, this is my grandmother,” Baba says, and points to another picture. The photo is coated in the dull gloss of golden age Hollywood stars, the woman in the portrait dripping with silver and black glamor. Her grey hair is sleek, swooping high over the curve of her face that has been gently touched by time. A cigarette grows a plume of smoke in one of her gloved hands.
“Elizabeth,” Jolyne knows. Pictures of her adorn the Joestar penthouse in Manhattan. Jolyne remembers mimicking her portraits with the stems of eaten lollipops.
“Right! And then, here,” Baba places the picture down and points to the one they came to discuss. “Kakyoin and Mr. Avdol. I don’t really know where to start, so, what would you like to know?”
Jolyne opens her mouth, and finds it has run dry. The opportunity to ask questions about anything never arises. She finds she doesn’t know how to ask, and thinks, struggling to remember a time where she hasn’t demanded answers with a raised voice.
Baba’s face is sweet. It’s like she was born to be a grandmother, with wrinkles that frame the corners of her smiles and her blue eyes.
Jolyne sighs, and with the air comes the words.
“What did my dad do in Egypt? Mostly he just said Kakyoin and Uncle Polnareff used to work for Dio, but Gramps, Avdol, and Dad helped them. They fought a bunch of stand users and then killed Dio together,” she says.
A crack in Baba’s smile forms and spreads slowly like a chip in a windshield, spidering out and touching every corner of her face. Jolyne wants to take it back.
“Your father killed Dio, honey. He did it alone.”
Air rushes into her lungs and she holds it there, eyes wide, shaking her head, looking at the picture of her father. Her grandmother’s face grows more concerned and Jolyne exhales explosively.
“Alone? He was a teenager! How the - how’d he not die, huh? Wasn’t Dio super strong? I know Dad’s got Star Platinum and all, but - Jesus!”
“Jolyne, calm down, it’s ok. He had some help, but he handled Dio himself. He was never really alone in Egypt,” Baba says and places her hand on Jolyne’s knee.
“Huh, that must’ve been nice,” she mutters and rolls her eyes. Baba squeezes her knee and the panic starts to fade when she pulls her hand back.
“He saved my father’s life, and mine, too. So did Mr. Avdol and Kakyoin. I only met them briefly but they were both very gentle, very kind people.”
Jolyne nods even though it’s difficult. She stares at the picture and bites the dead skin on her lip.
“How old was Kakyoin?”
“Seventeen, same as your father. They attended the same high school.”
“Jesus,” Jolyne mutters, because he looks it. The seams on his shoulders sag a little. His presence in the picture is quiet and pale like him, and his sunburn is bright against the color of his hair.
“Did, um,” she starts, did Dad see him die, then stops. “No, never mind.”
She doesn’t have to know. The backseat of a stolen car at the end of the world feels like it happened in a different time, one separate from her life but somehow, defining it. Leaning her cheek into the mesh of Annasui’s shoulder, and not having the strength to cry her burning eyes out over Weather Report’s death; a memory that feels like it might not have happened. The only feeling beyond mourning was the unwavering faith that Dad would know what to do.
He did. They talked through sleepless nights on the apartment balcony, him with a beer she would steal sips of, and pour her heart out about why the night was so sleepless. He wouldn’t say much, but it was always what she needed to hear.
“Uncle Polnareff was ok, right?” she asks to cover up all that she doesn’t want to mention. Instead, she focuses on how strange it is to see Uncle Polnareff so young, and with his body. He is basking in the attention of the camera.
“Oh, yes, he had only minor injuries. He visited many times, after they met and before they went to Egypt again.”
“Again?”
“I never heard much about it,” Baba says, and it’s clear the gaps in her knowledge upset her. “It was when you were two, and that was when Polnareff lost his legs. I remember because I was with you. You had the chicken pox and your father called from the hospital in Italy to tell you not to scratch.”
She doesn’t remember that. She never heard about it.
“Do you know what they were doing?” she asks.
Baba shakes her head. “It was something to do with Dio, that’s all. And it was important enough for your father to leave. I think it helped him, being able to come back from whatever happened, to you and your mother. He walked in and held you for so long, you started to hit his face.”
Jolyne snorts half-heartedly. That sounds right, and she wants to ask for more, more about the trips and what her father has done, but different words are on her tongue. They trip out clumsily.
“What was - um. What was he like, when he came back? T-the first time, I mean.”
Her grandmother is silent. She holds her hands together in her lap, expression blank. The openness she usually exhibits does nothing, like a door opened to let in the breeze but there is only stale air. Her lips part, slowly, and the words step out.
“Restless. He didn’t know what to do,” Baba admits. “He had to go back to school and that was when he started to like it - he really pushed himself to get his grades up. He started helping around the house. But then, I’d hear something break, and find him cleaning it up, and telling me not to worry. His stand was always out, as if he didn’t have enough room in him to put it back.”
She sighs. It’s Jolyne’s turn: she places her hand over her grandmother’s, and Baba gives her a smile.
“Things turned around when he decided to go to college. I don’t think he would’ve settled down if he hadn’t gone to school in Florida. Being away helped, I think.”
Her grandmother is crying. Not the usual dramatic tears that pop up when she looks at her family for too long or when a dog in a movie dies, but the soft kind people brush away to pretend they’re not there. Baba chuckles wetly and uses the hand Jolyne isn’t holding to rub her eyes.
“I’m sorry I brought all this up. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Jolyne says.
Baba laughs, and shakes her head.
“No, no, don’t apologize. It makes sense you’d want to know.”
Her eyelashes are still laced with tears but she is smiling, looking at the picture again.
“You helped him a lot,” Baba says.
Jolyne is shaking her head before she realizes how surprised she is to hear it. Baba doesn’t catch it, and sighs, fondness filling her chest.
“You take after him.”
Jolyne breathes in sharply and squeezes her hand. Suddenly, the temperature gets to her, and the heat trapped under her unwashed hair makes her feel disgusting. If it weren’t rude, she’d free her grandmother’s hand from the sweat of her palm. She would live in a shower if she could.
“Um, I think that’s enough for today,” Jolyne says, and pulls away her hand. “You told me a lot and, uh, I feel kinda sweaty so I think I’ll shower. Thanks for talking to me about all of this, Baba.”
Her grandmother is pulled from her thoughts and catches up with Jolyne’s hurried speech. She is left bobbing in the wake of Jolyne’s sudden need to go.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, honey. If you have any more questions, just let me know.”
She’s so sincere it makes Jolyne’s face burn hot and greasy; the red in her skin is physical. She forces a smile and jerks her head toward the hall.
“Can you show me how the bathrooms work here?”
With that, Baba is smiling and laughing again, chattering like a bird on the walk out. She is wrapped up in comparing Japanese and American bathing standards. It allows Jolyne to spare a departing glance at the room, her eyes drawn to the shrine shifting to the dog, who raises his head, and meets her gaze. She turns away.
Jolyne lies on top of the blanket. The soft mounds pillowing around her body fill with heat, and she shifts, dragging her stretched arms and legs onto cooler territory. There is no wind tonight, with only the sounds of grasshoppers chirping in a small cacophony of white noise, drifting in through the open walls. Somewhere in the garden, a bamboo pipe fills with water and calls out a stream of hollow knocks, in time with itself. She can’t sleep.
Baba had done her hair after her bath. She couldn’t figure out the braids, so Jolyne kept two simple buns all day, and helped with chores around the house. It was easy, mindless work; maintaining a good house was easier than fixing a cheap and shitty apartment.
They made dinner together and ate it in the garden with the dog that stuck around all day. He ate anything they handed him but never wagged his tail or begged; Jolyne called him an asshole, while Baba called him proud. He was never sent home but he seemed to disappear after they went into the TV room, and Baba fell asleep during the movie they watched.
Jolyne gets up when the heat becomes too much and she convinces herself that a snack would help. She hopes it’s jetlag.
The night is a dark blue she never sees in Florida, where the neon and streetlights compete between pink-purple and dull yellow to color the air. It’s darker than she’s used to, but it isn’t quite black; it is easy to walk down the path of floors through the walls of bare beams. It is the skeleton of a house.
It hits her as she enters the kitchen that it doesn’t feel like a home. It’s just a place and a time that doesn’t exist anymore for anyone but Baba and Sofu. For her, it’s a foreign playhouse that almost became normal. For her father, she doesn’t know. Maybe a place still covered in photographs of the person that died in Egypt and came back, because it was what he was supposed to come back to.
Jolyne opens the fridge and grabs a pinch of cold rice leftover from dinner, and it tastes like water. For no reason she cares to find, she leaves the kitchen and steps out into the back garden.
The dog is there. She almost misses him as he blends into the blurry-edged plants, and he turns his head when she steps onto the porch. He keeps his gaze steady somewhere in the pitch black of his face.
Then, he trots out of the garden through the open gate fence. Baba must’ve left it open for him to come and go, and Jolyne follows to shut the gate behind him. Someone must be missing him and he should go home.
She peeks out into the fields just in time to see the dog break into a bounding run for the woods, and she pulls her hand from the gate.
The woods are like the dog, silhouetted and looking right at her. Hermes would call her crazy for thinking it, but she knows in her gut she’s right. She also knows she has to check it out.
It’s not like sneaking out of a window, but Jolyne look back at the house anyway for fear of being caught. The step into the field is nothing like landing on her knees in the cactus planted in the front garden of her childhood home, no bleeding skin from the jump, no fear of doing the wrong thing. The trimmed, damp grass greets her with cool relief against the heat. The vibrations of her lazy walk kick up moths and send them and their heavy wings flying.
At the edge of the woods, she can’t hear her father say don’t anymore, but it feels like he is still behind her at the gate.
The woods in Japan are lush, unlike the scrubby plants and palm that form small islands among the pavement back home. The ground bounces beneath her feet, the darkness laid on a bed of moss. The tree trunks are thick and plants seem to grow on top of each other. The entirety of the dark canopy hums with a thousand quiet lives of green, silent hearts.
She doesn’t go far and sits on a large rock being swallowed by a tree trunk, allowing her feet to rest on a high arch of root that is webbed with strings of more roots belonging to other trees. She feels them with her toes. She knows the woods are short and across from her start is the end, feeding into another field, similar but different, with another old home belonging to another old family.
She can see the Kujo house from here framed by the woods. In the dark it is a silhouette of short, long rectangles; the idea of a house. She can imagine the child her father used to be living there.